Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 1 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
By Janet Rems
Special to the Rappahannock News
Information technology (IT) expert Tim Hoechst looked out over a room filled with Virginia business people and bluntly told them that even though this country has not had a significant terrorist attack since Sept. 11,2001, “it’s not because they haven’t tried.”
As Oracle’s “chief technology guy,” it’s Hoechst’s business to know.
Hoechst spends much of his time helping various governmental organizations deal with the enormous challenges of homeland security. And many of the IT companies he connects with the country’s intelligence community are — like Oracle — Dulles corridor based.
Although the federal government’s new Homeland Security Department is headquartered in Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia is “in a nice position to support the new department,” Hoechst told the several hundred gathered at a recent conference in Northern Virginia.
Money in the $40-$50 billion range will “flow down to Northern Virginia,” he predicted.
Key among the challenges facing those involved in protecting the United States from terrorist attacks — and the businesses supporting that effort — is the need to balance security with democratic freedoms.
“We want to come out of this with the same Constitution we went into it with. We don’t want to destroy what we want to protect,” Hoechst said.
Two other equally urgent challenges, he said, are the need for the intelligence community to retool for a new kind of enemy and the need to find better ways to share the information gathered.
The CIA of the Cold War era was designed to direct its eyes out toward one major Mayer — the former Soviet
89.1%